


Click

by ficteer



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Humor, M/M, background relationships: Tajima/Hanai Izumi/Nishihiro and Suyama/Sakaeguchi, the canon divergent romantic comedy you didn't know you wanted until you got it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 19:57:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3908641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficteer/pseuds/ficteer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘how do i impress my soulmate’, ‘easy chocolate recipes’, ‘how to get chocolate out of a white shirt’, ‘how to write poetry’, ‘what rhymes with pitcher’, ‘how to make the best paper airplane’.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Click

**Author's Note:**

> 'i've been neglecting oofuri i should write a cute little something' i say, and eleven thousand words later, This

(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘how do you open a mailbox’.)

\----------

It’s ass o’clock in the morning, and Abe’s wearing sweatpants and a messed up tee shirt, hand clutching desperately around a cup of coffee as he tries to pry his mailbox open. It’s his seventh day in this apartment complex, his first week finally living on his own, a brand new job coaching baseball at the local high school lined up to start in the next couple weeks, and he  _really_  needs to figure out how the hell to open his mailbox.

The hall is empty because of the early hour, which was  _totally_  not planned so that no one could see him try to grapple with the lock. It was a little spin dial, and he  _knew_  his combination, put it in as per the instructions, but every time, the stupid mailbox refused to open, and if he had to go to the mailroom one more time to get his mail, he was pretty sure the bespectacled old woman behind the desk was going to start charging him.

Screw this. He’s going to give up and settle into an indefinite period of having to get his mail from the smug, judging witch of the mail coordinator for the building, Abe decides. It’s way too early in the morning for this, it’s always going to be too early in the morning for this, and he’s got better things to do with his time than fight with a mailbox that clearly just doesn’t like him.

Abe walks over to the window, and smacks a hand on the little bell placed there. His eyes fall to the desk area behind the opening, and, huh, that one pink frilly pen of hers was gone, and the picture of her little yappy dog was gone, and -

“Can I help you?”

Blond hair and hazel eyes and  _definitely_  not a grumpy old woman. Abe blinks once, then swallows thickly, because he suddenly feels too warm and  _honestly_  the guy wasn’t even  _hot_. He was  _scrawny_  and  _tiny_  and (okay maybe those arms did look kinda good and his hair looked pretty soft and he was licking his lips nervously in a manner that was just  _filthy_ and  _illegal_ and it had been a  _long time_ but)  _whatever_.

“Mail, uh, for 316,” Abe replies, and he is suddenly, painfully aware of the fact that his tee shirt was maybe needing washing two wears ago but he hadn’t had the time to call his mom to ask her how the hell to do laundry yet and there were way too many buttons on the machine for him to figure it out on his own.

“Oh, um, okay, hold on,” the guy responds, and he slips back behind the mailboxes and leaves Abe to stare down at the formica counter, positively horrified at himself. He’s very awake, much more than he had been before, and he doesn’t miss the undignified squawking noise and the sound of something heavy falling, muffled to the ground, from the other side of the mailboxes.

“Uh… Are you okay?” he calls out, and the cute blond returns, face bright red and now decisively looking everywhere  _except_  Abe’s face.

“Y-Yes, I’m fine, just… tr-tripped on a box, and uh… Here… you go….”

The blond all but shoves the mail into Abe’s hand and then turns, probably to go take care of whatever mess he’d made in tripping. Abe lingers for a moment, but as soon as he realizes that it’s because he wants to know the blond’s name and not for a reason that actually makes any fucking sense, he feels his stomach swoop and he turns on his heel to get to the elevator, almost spilling his coffee on himself in the process.

When he gets back to his room, he shuts the door heavily behind him and leans against it for a second, staring into his apartment and realizing that his heart was beating way too fast in his chest for someone who’d taken the elevator and not the stairs. He’s quick to drop off his mail in the kitchen, and also his coffee, and then his right hand reaches up to press heavily against his right hipbone as he stares unseeingly into his kitchen sink.

Beneath his palm, hidden by cotton, is the name  _Ren_ , a name he’d never cared to know, until now.

\----------

It takes him a few hours to realize that, duh, the cute blond guy got his  _mail_ , and therefore he knew Abe’s name, and if he’d seen it, he would have  _known_  that Abe was his soulmate, and okay, this was really stupid. The cute blond guy at the mail center was not his soulmate, and he could really calm the fuck down now, thanks.

He does, however, realize that he probably would feel more comfortable asking cute blond guy how the fuck to open his mailbox than he did the harpy from before. At least cute blond guy won’t take his head off. In fact, Abe kind of feels like he’s bullying him a bit, which is  _stupid_ , because it’s the guy’s  _job_ , and okay. Really, this was enough. Tomorrow, one hundred percent, he’s going to go down tomorrow morning and ask the guy how the fuck to open his mailbox. He’s got a job starting in two weeks and he’s not going to have time to be fighting to get his correspondence. (And, more importantly, his paycheck.)

Vitalized, Abe starts making his supper. He’s not great at cooking, but he can manage pasta and canned sauce, though it’s maybe a little sticky and clumpy and yeah okay he can’t cook for shit, but it’s edible and with a huge salad, it’s good. He cracks open a beer when he’s done, and decides that he kinda wants to go sit out on his balcony because it’s a nice night despite the winter still clinging desperately to March chill.

His mother had convinced him to buy a chair, and he’s really glad now that she did, because it’s nice enough outside that he finds himself sitting in it and propping his feet up on the railing. The ambient sounds of Saitama around him are soothing in that inner-city kind of way; cars driving past, chatter far enough that he can’t make out what anyone is actually saying and it’s more white noise, someone listening to atrocious English rap from an open window not too far down, and - oh.

Having never really spent too much time outside on his balcony just yet, Abe hadn’t really noticed that his neighbor to the right seemed to have quite the little garden going. At least ten different pots were on the balcony, arranged prettily and spilling funky-looking plants all over the place. None of them had flowers, which Abe kinda thought was weird since why else would you have plants if not because they had pretty flowers, right? And then, he saw the cat, white with two black stripes on its back that honest to God would make it look like a baseball if they were red. It was snoozing on the balcony, tail flicking lazily, until there was something from inside the apartment that had its head perking up quickly. The motion caused a little bell to ring from around its neck, and Abe felt his eyebrow arch when he saw that the bell was a little baseball.

Before he could study the cat any further, it jumped off the perch on the railing and slid through a cat door into the apartment next door, leaving Abe to stare at his neighbor’s balcony with a bit of odd curiosity. Someone liked baseball who lived there, and his mother’s nagging that he should introduce himself to his neighbors because  _not_  doing so was rude popped back up into his head, and, huh. Maybe she was onto something after all.

\----------

The next morning, Abe put on clothes for a good workout, including his Nishiura High School Baseball shirt, because he wasn’t really sure how to say  _Hey I saw your cat had a baseball charm and I like baseball too wanna grab some beer and catch a game sometime_  without being. Well.  _Himself_. Abe knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t make friends easily, after enough denial over the fact in high school and, well, through most of university too.

But, all of his planning went to waste, because when he finally braved up and buzzed on his neighbor’s doorbell after a minute or so of creepily standing on the doorstep, no one answered. He glanced down at his watch and wondered who the hell would be leaving even earlier than he did, then huffed out and decided he would just try again when he came back from his workout.

To his credit, he went straight to his mailbox first, just to check. He put in the code, perfectly, lining up the little notch with the little numbers so that the mechanism would have no doubt that yes Abe Takaya did in fact know his combination, thank you very much, but again, the handle didn’t budge. He gave it three solid tries, and right when he was about to fall into the cursing-at-it-and-kicking-it method, he retreated.

(Okay, so, maybe he had a few more tries in him before he got to that point, but cute blond guy, and, yeah.)

Abe goes to the window and doesn’t even have to ring the bell, because cute blond guy is sitting at his desk, clicking around in a spreadsheet for stuff. Hazel eyes blink up into his face, and then the guy flushes red and visibly forces himself to maintain eye contact. Geez. Abe hadn’t even laughed when he tripped but the guy just couldn’t let it go.

“316?” the blond more said despite the upwards lilt of a question, pushing back from the computer and leaving before Abe could even eke out that yes, he needed the mail for apartment three-one-six but he also kinda needed to know how to open his mailbox, because as cool as it was that he got to see this cute guy every morning, he kind of needed to be self-sufficient, too, and what if you aren’t here, and - “Is there something wrong with your mailbox?”

Abe looks up and snags his mail from the offered hand, and he shrugs lightly. “I can’t get it open. I put the code in right and everything, but it never clicks open.”

The blond blinks once, then twice, and then, “Oh, let me try something,” he says, and disappears once again. Then, there’s a click of a door on the far side of the mailboxes, and Abe looks to see cute blond guy stepping out of the back and walking up to his mailbox. He waits for Abe to come close. “What’s your code?”

“12-06-32,” Abe answers, and he watches as the cute blond guy puts in the numbers, and  _click_ , the mailbox falls open in perfect time to Abe’s jaw. “How the hell did you do that?!”

“Uh - “ Abe looks down and realizes that he’s shouting, and Izumi had told him about this over beers,  _“Can you please not yell at the people here so I can pick someone up for a change?”_  and  _“Dude, it doesn’t matter if you mean to, you sound like you’re fucking gonna take their head off. Chill.”_ , and so he huffs out in irritation (he might have the time for it, now, but he sure as hell doesn’t have the patience) and tries again.

“I can’t get it to open. What’s the trick?” he asks after inhaling for a few seconds and exhaling, concentrating on keeping his voice even. The blond reacts better to that, doesn’t look like he’s terrified that Abe’s going to eat him in three bites, then shuts the mailbox door.

“Y-You have to, there’s, to the left, a little… um…” The blond’s eyebrows furrow as he tries to find the words for whatever little trick he’s trying to explain to Abe. His left hand is in the air, gesturing uselessly, and then the blond looks up at Abe, swallows, then straightens his shoulders. “Here, put - try to open it.”

“Okay,” Abe says, glad that the guy was finally able to spit something out that made some fucking sense, and he put his code in carefully. Right when he was about to pull his hand away on the third number to test the latch, a warm hand snatched out over the top of his and Abe was very suddenly still and very aware of the fact that cute blond guy had soft hands.

“Now, turn it slightly to the left, until - ” the blond said, and Abe moved his wrist under his direction, and then there was a slight change in the torque of the knob, a slight catch, and he heard the latch click. “There.”

Abe checked, and sure enough, the mailbox popped right open. It was empty, of course, considering he’d already gotten the mail out the back end, but he could  _finally_  open his fucking mailbox. He clicked it shut, then tried it again, turning it slightly to the left, and boom, the damn thing opened.

“Huh. Awesome,” he said, and he turned to the blond with a smile. “Thanks, man.”

“M-Mihashi,” the blond offered, and Abe nodded once, repeating it once for the name in his mouth and achingly aware of the  _Ren_  heavy on his hipbone. He already knew it wasn’t the case, so what was the point of making it worse?

\----------

Abe’s job as coach at Nishiura High started perfectly on schedule two weeks later, and along with it came the sneaking suspicion that his neighbor next door - to the right, with the cat that looked like a baseball and answered to Abe’s tongue clicks with sly stares while sitting in the garden that had no flowers - was ignoring him, had the most bizarre work schedule, or didn’t fucking exist.

(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘how do i brown ground beef’, ‘can you rent an apartment just for a cat’, ‘how to clean burned meat out of a pan’, ‘good saitama sushi’.)

But every time he thought about giving up on meeting a neighbor who liked baseball enough to get a baseball bell for their cat, he’d go out, have a beer on his balcony, and see the cat and remember Sakaeguchi’s laughing voice and  _“You’ll be fine, Abe. You can make friends. I believe in you!”_

Worse yet, now he knew how to open his mailbox, so he didn’t have an excuse to stop by and see Mihashi anymore. The blond would wave when he walked by, smiling nervously like Abe was some kind of ticking time bomb waiting to explode and take his head off, and that was it. Two weeks of that, two weeks of no neighbor and a stupid, taunting cat, and a new job, and yeah, Abe was ready for a schedule.

It was odd, coming back to Nishiura as a coach, to the school he’d attended years ago on the hopes of finding a pitcher and striking out. Not that he wasn’t good friends with Hanai and Oki, now, not that they hadn’t tried their best to be the kind of pitcher the team needed, not that he regretted not following Haruna to Musashino, not that it hadn't been fun, the nine of them on the field, but… it hadn’t been the high school baseball experience Abe had wanted. Something had been missing. Something that had always been missing, something that sounded like the crispness of a baseball hitting leather, something that felt like adrenaline of sinking into a crouch across from a pitcher for nine innings of strategy, something that smelled like sunshine and felt like dust beneath his cleats. Even in university, after joining a huge team and finally having pitchers that could push him to be a better catcher, there had always been something just. Not there.

The dust hadn’t changed, and Abe allows himself a few seconds of calm meditation to grind it beneath his shoes. Shiga-sensei and Momokan are both gone, Shiga-sensei having retired and Momoe having gone on to coach at the university level when she’d finally convinced Abe to take her place.  _“If anyone can do it, you can, Abe-kun,_ ” she’d said, and it had been fucking weird, sharing a beer with his coach, but it had been the night Abe had finally felt like he’d known what to do with his life, and he hadn’t looked back ever since.

Hanai was already on the field, standing in the dugout with his hands on his hips. He’d finally let his hair grow out, and it was a wild, curly mess, which Tajima had whispered into his ear once, years ago, was apparently the reason he’d kept it short when they were in school.

“How many are we looking to get?” Hanai asks when Abe’s finally in range to talk, and Abe feels the teasing smirk on his face.

“Shouldn’t you know that,  _Sensei_?”

“We are  _so_  not going there, Abe.”

Abe laughs a bit, reaching over and clasping Hanai on the shoulder before looking over the field. “Thirty,” he answers finally, and Hanai sighs out next to him, reaching a hand up to rub at the back of his neck. Abe watches, eyes catching where  _Yuuichirou_  is written there, and he thinks not for the first time that it’s fitting for Hanai, the ultimate sap, to have been the one of all of them to find his soulmate as his high school sweetheart.

(Not that half of the team hadn’t hooked up with the other half, somehow,  _bizarrely_ , as if Nishiura’s baseball diamond had some kind of pheromones attracting pairs to it, because  _really_ , three couples out of nine dudes, fucking  _seriously_.

But he doesn’t really give them any grief,  _can’_ t _,_ not when he sometimes catches himself wondering what it would have been like if Ren had been a baseball player, fuck - if Ren had been a  _pitcher_ , if he could have formed a battery with his soulmate, if all those times he’d accidentally walked in on Izumi and Nishihiro sucking face could have been someone walking in on him and Ren, if Suyama and Sakaeguchi huddled together talking about infield strategy could have been him and Ren, heads pressed and shoulders melded as they went over pitch calling -

It had been a fantasy he’d had more than once.)

He pulls his head out of his ass because the boys are starting to trickle in to meet their coach and teaching advisor, and Hanai’s standing a little straighter like he feels really good being back on the diamond, and Abe gets it, he does, and it’s in that second that he lets his days at Nishiura become the history that they are, because if he has anything to say about it, these boys in front of him are going to do what the nine of them couldn’t.

\----------

(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘blank baseball field diagrams’, ‘how to install clothes line’, ‘healthy cheap cat treats’, ‘how to get tomato juice out of a white shirt’, ‘saitama curry’.)

\----------

It’s a month or so into the school year the first time he passes Mihashi and doesn’t get a wave as a greeting because the idiot is slumped onto his folded arms and sleeping. The first time, he just shrugs it off as young dudes partying (because Mihashi was  _totally_  younger than he was, and even if he didn’t really seem the type to party, well, what other explanation was there for him to be sleeping when he was on the clock?)

The second time was a week after that, but it was the third time when it was but days later that Abe realized he was actually stopping by the window to check, because it was getting to be a  _thing_  that Mihashi was sleeping and not waving at him. He’s not really sure why he’s so hung up on the fact that Mihashi isn’t waving at him, until it occurs to him (in the middle of battling a small grease fire, actually) that duh, Mihashi is the one who takes care of his mail, and if the idiot is too tired to work, he’s gonna mess up his mail sorting, and that’s grossly irresponsible.

“He’s too old to be out partying like this. He has a job and needs to be mature,” he tells the cat while he eats his takeout curry, door open behind him so the smell of incinerated dry noodles could air out a bit. “If I lose a paycheck because he’s being stupid, I’m going to report him.”

The cat flicks her tail and smirks at him like  _yeah right buddy_ , and, yeah, she has him there.

As soon as the smell of fire has filtered out of his apartment enough for him to stand to go back inside, he abandons the all-too-knowing cat in the non-flowering garden just in time for the sound of a skype call to ring out from his laptop. He walks over, still carrying his dinner, and sees that it’s none other than Shun, who is currently traveling abroad in America for his baseball scholarship, somewhere in New York. He accepts the call, and before he can even get a word out to greet his brother, Shun’s face screws up.

“Is that smoke?” he asks, and Abe scowls.

“No,” he answers, then, more honestly, “Just a little. Shut up. What do you want?”

Shun rolls his eyes, sighing. “I saw you were on and thought I’d call you before I went to class, since I figured you’d probably be sitting all alone on your couch eating takeout like the nerd you are.”

Abe tries to move his curry out of the camera’s vision as discretely as possible. Not because he cares if Shun is right or not, but because Abe doesn’t want to hear about it when he  _is_. “How’s America?”

“Pretty good. I’m kind of swamped by the English, but I’ve got a partner who’s supposed to be helping me with it for extra credit, and she’s really good, so I’m better than people who got paired off with slackers. How’s coaching? Is Mom hovering over at your apartment yet?”

Abe nods, and looks hungrily at his curry, then decides he doesn’t care enough about pride to go without. He picks it up and starts eating. “She actually hasn’t even been over since I moved in,” Abe admits, chewing thoughtfully because huh, that did seem kind of weird.

“Hah, I  _knew_  you’d be eating takeout, Taka,” Shun says, then, “You should invite her over, y’know. She’s not gonna ask, but she’ll get ideas that you don’t want her over or whatever.”

Abe grimaces, because Shun has a point. “Yeah, true. I’ll invite her over for dinner or something.” He then looks down at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be leaving soon?”

“Oh, shit,” Shun says, looking at his clock. “I’ll talk to you later, Taka!” Then clicks off, leaving Abe to sit in his apartment, lean back into his couch, and stare blankly at the wall. He’s not sure why it hits him now; maybe it has to do with the fact that Shun is a in a different country and it’s still so easy to remember the two of them elbowing their way to the sink to spit out toothpaste, or maybe it’s the thought of his parents alone together in a house a little too big just for the two of them, or maybe it’s the way Abe is sitting on a couch big enough for three but he’s the only one there.

His right hand lifts to his right hip and he traces over it slowly, a little frightened by the fact that he’s feeling this overwhelming lonely hole in his gut and he’s assuaging it with his soulmate’s name. It’s a slippery slope, he knows, because there are websites for names and everything and he’s determined not to be like That Guy on the commercials, smiling cheesily into the camera while cooing  _“I met my soulmate on Soulnames dot com_ ”, but he  _wants,_ fuck but he wants in a way he’s never really let himself want before, in a way he’s never let himself think before.

But he thinks about it, sitting there; what it would be like to have someone here when he got home after practice, a second pair of shoes next to his, someone to laugh at him when he set his pasta on fire because he got too distracted telling them about what his kids are doing in practice, someone to sit out next to him on his balcony to sip beers and take in the evening calm before they fell into each other’s arms for bed. He thinks about Ren, what they’re like, if they’re sitting somewhere right now and tracing lonely fingers over the word  _Takaya_  and wondering what  _he’s_  like or if they’re the type to find someone in the meantime, if they’re happy in someone else’s arms right now and not even really thinking about it, if they’re everything Abe has refused to be because what is the point of having anything beyond a hookup if it’s not your soulmate?

Abe stands up from his couch and puts the rest of his curry in his fridge, grumpy as hell because  _this_  was  _exactly_  the reason why he hated thinking about the whole soulmate thing, this  _sucked_  he didn’t  _care_  and he was going to go to bed now because he was tired. And yes, he was tired, and yes, he went to bed, but no, he didn’t fall asleep to feel better, but rather, he tossed and turned for hours, huffing angrily into his pillow and swallowing the need to cry against an emptiness he hated feeling.

\----------

(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘how to go to sleep faster’, ‘how to cure insomnia’, ‘hangover cures’, ‘why is my spreadsheet not centering’, ‘spreadsheet online’, ‘good air fresheners to cover burn smells’, ‘super easy dinner recipes’.)

\----------

Abe prints out the sheet of paper at work and folds it up, writing Mihashi’s name on the outside of the trifold. He knows it’s probably pretty stupid to put together a time schedule for someone he doesn’t even know that well so they can sleep better and not fucking sleep at work, even  _he_  knows it’s weird, but it doesn’t stop him, and when he gets back to his apartment and, sure enough, Mihashi is snoozing, he puts the paper there along with a cup of coffee he’d picked up from the cute little cafe just down the street and then went back out for groceries.

He’d settled on jalapeno-basil chicken breasts when he’d gone hunting for recipes to cook for his mother and father to come over, mostly because it looked impressive in the pictures and sounded hard to make, but it actually only had six ingredients and sounded easy enough.

He walks into the grocery store and grabs the jar of jalapano pepper jelly, a bottle of white wine, and the chicken. He then goes over to the fresh basil and grimaces at the price. Okay, so, this is not a dish he’s going to make very often, then, he decides, not to mention the fact that he is absolutely not allowed to fuck it up, because holy shit it’s expensive.

He comes back into his apartment and is surprised to see Mihashi  _not_  sleeping, nursing the cup of coffee between his hands with a terribly fond look on his face. He considers stopping in the doorway for just a little while to soak it in, but not only would that just be  _fucking_  weird, Mihashi’s head comes up at the sound of the door opening.

“O-Oh, Abe-kun,” he says, eyes going wide and face burning red. The blond wiggles in place as he struggles under the monumental weight of embarrassment, then finally cuts his eyes up, lips pressed together tightly. “Th-Thank you, for… the schedule, um… but I don’t understand the hangover? Part?”

Abe feels the back of his neck heat up. “Wait, how did you know it was me?” he asks, and Mihashi mades a soft noise of surprise before looking steadily down in his lap as if he himself had not considered that question.

“It… Um… Well… It seemed… obvious? I don’t really… I’m sorry if it wasn’t…”

“No, it was, but… Hangover. Because you’ve been sleeping on the job. Because you party.” Abe is indeed capable of complete sentences, he knows, but somehow, he’s having a tough time with them at the moment, apparently. “You’ve been sleeping a lot since the semester started, so I just figured…”

“Abe-kun knew I was in school?” Mihashi asks, and then it was Abe’s turn to wonder how the hell he’d known that, because, well… it had just been  _obvious_ , right? “But… I don’t drink, so… I’ve just been busy, because… well, this job, then classes, then the shift at the restaurant, and - ”

“Restaurant?” Abe repeats, surprised as Mihashi hadn’t really seemed the type to go for a table waiting job since that required… well… the ability to communicate with people.

“Yeah, it’s part of my graduation requirement, to work at the restaurant. I’ve got desserts this semester, so I’ve been having to work the late shift, and it’s… well… I haven’t been sleeping a lot,” Mihashi confesses finally. “But it’s okay, because, if I want to open my own restaurant, I have to get through this, so… I don’t mind. I can keep cooking.” Abe blinks, and then it clicks into place.

“You… go to a culinary school. After you work here,” he pieces together, and Mihashi nods, then smiles nervously. “Huh. Awesome. Maybe I can get some tips from you sometime.”

Mihashi perks up, face brightening just a bit. “A-Abe-kun likes to cook?!”

“I… probably shouldn’t be allowed,” Abe admits. “I’m… pretty sure I’ve lost my deposit by now, actually.”

Mihashi pulls a face, but then he smiles, leaning forward and propping his head on his hands and generally reminding Abe that yes, Mihashi was indeed good-looking despite his weird personality, and he’d missed their little chats perhaps more than he’d realized. “I’ll make you a sheet of tips…! For the sleep sheet…!”

Warmth spread inside Abe’s chest like milk in water, and he had to remind himself to breathe. “Yeah, that… sounds perfect. Thanks.”

Abe turns to go into the elevator at that, shutting the door and slumping backwards against the wall of the elevator. He closes his eyes, then lets his head bang back against the metal. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He feels it, feels what he’s doing, knows exactly what’s going on, and he  _hates_  it. He’s gotten feelings for someone who wasn’t his soulmate before, and while he suspects Mihashi will let him down better than Haruna had, it still isn’t any fun.

By the time the elevator doors open, Abe has steeled himself into Just Being Friends with Mihashi, and then he takes that thought and puts it delicately into the back of his mind and instead focuses on the fact that his mother is coming over for dinner and he needs to get cooking.

Abe pulls up the recipe on his laptop and starts by putting the pepper jelly, wine, and basil into the saucepan as per the instructions. The recipe says five minutes, so he stirs away. When the three minute point arrives and his mixture is starting to boil dangerously, Abe blinks down at it cautiously. No, the recipe had said  _five_ , he reminds himself, stirring away, until soon the familiar smell of charred whatever hits his nose and he knows right away that nope, he’s fucked up.

He takes the saucepan and puts it in his sink, rereads the recipe and then decides that a 6/10 must not be low enough to qualify as ‘low heat’. He cleans out the pan, looks nervously at the clock, then cleans faster. He puts in more pepper jelly, another half cup of wine, and then the last half of the chopped basil, chewing on his lower lip. He absolutely could  _not_ fuck this up now, because that was the last of his basil.

He gets through to the end of the five minutes and lets the mixture cool as instructed, then pours it into a bag. He throws the chicken in there, then puts the chicken onto the heated grill to cook until they’re done.

It’s when he puts the chicken on the plates that he suddenly realizes that, well, shit. He kind of needed more than just  _chicken_  to make it a meal, and the whole  _point_  of having his parents over was so they could see that  _yes_  Abe Takaya could take care of himself as a mature, responsible adult, thank you very much. He opened his fridge and was greeted with milk and sandwich meat and leftover takeout. Okay, no. Shit.  _Shit_.

A knocking at his door had Abe’s stomach dropping out of his gut, because  _fuck_ , his parents were here and he couldn’t exactly pretend that he’d intended for them to call into takeout the whole time since his apartment smelled like the chicken, but he couldn’t serve them just the chicken, and he really probably should be breathing right now but who’s paying attention?

Resigning himself to the fact that he’s about to look really stupid in front of his parents, Abe walks over to his door and opens it, mouth open to start explaining how his idiot neighbor cat stole the rest of their dinner gasp how horrible, only to see one Mihashi standing in front of his door, a piece of paper in his hands and a sheepish look on his face.

“Um, I thought you probably didn’t mean for me to make this right now, but I was bored, so - ”

“Mihashi,” Abe interrupts, because please, God,  _please_. “My parents are coming over for dinner and I need help.”

“…Okay? What do you have?” Mihashi asks, going to peer over Abe’s shoulder.

“Nothing, that’s the problem, I have chicken and  _sandwich meat_  I can’t  _believe_  I didn’t - Where are you going,” Abe asks, watching as Mihashi turned and then started walking down the hall and oh my God he was reaching for the door where the cat lived and, “Mihashi, you can’t just  _break_  into my neighbor’s apartment, I’m not that desperate.” That was a lie. He probably  _was_  that desperate.

Mihashi blinks at him, then makes this chirpy sound Abe belatedly realizes is a laugh. He fights the urge to bury his face in a bucket of ice water. “Abe-kun, this  _is_  my apartment,” Mihashi says, and, oh. Oh.

“Your cat,” Abe says, following behind Mihashi and walking into an apartment that was set up pretty similarly to his own, except for the fact that it was a good bit messier and the kitchen was  _definitely_  more well-loved. All different kinds of appliances littered the counters, and when Mihashi opened the fridge, it was filled not really with food, but with ingredients, things to cook, and his pantry - oh god, Abe wasn’t even a chef and he had to bite back a groan.

“Shuuto? What about her?” Mihashi asks, then, “Wait. First, what are you making?”

“Uh, Jalapeno-Basil Chicken,” he answers, because Mihashi has a cat named after a baseball pitch and has a kitchen like a wet dream. “You… like baseball?”

Mihashi opens his fridge again and gets out a head of romaine lettuce before he goes over to his sink to wash his hands. Abe sees his face, then, and notes that there’s a weird expression there. “I, um. I used to play. Pitcher.” Abe’s teeth sink into his lower lip so hard he wonders for a second if it’s possible to chew it right off. “I had an injury right before I went into high school, though. Hurt my elbow and couldn’t play anymore.”

The sense of loss is as acute in Abe as if he was the one told the news. He reaches out to grab Mihashi’s counter, focusing on the shoulder blades moving beneath a long-sleeved shirt as Mihashi cut up what looked like the beginnings of a salad. “I was a catcher. I coach, now. At Nishiura.”

Mihashi freezes, then looks over at Abe with an expression that’s half ache and half amusement. “That’s where I went to high school,” he says, and suddenly, Abe wonders if there’s a ghost in the building that just punched him in the diaphragm. Mihashi went to Nishiura, Mihashi was a  _pitcher_. He was supposed to pitch at Nishiura. He was supposed to be  _Abe’s_  pitcher. He can’t breathe, can’t swallow, his chest  _hurts, he_ can’t look away from Mihashi’s back where the blond is cooking - his hip is on  _fire_.

“ _Ren_ ,” he manages to say, the word strangled and wrecked from his throat, and he watches as Mihashi drops the metal bowl in his hand to the counter with a loud clang. Abe feels his eyes shut, and it’s too much, what he feels, it’s everything, so much joy and  _home_  and the ache of a void being shoved so full so suddenly and anger,  _anger_ , “ _Why didn’t you say anything_?!”

“I - !” Mihashi starts, turning around, shoulders hitched up to his ears and face blotched red with the tears that are beginning to collect in his eyes. “I didn’t - I didn’t know for sure, and - Takaya - ” Abe just about  _groans_  in pleasure hearing his name from Mihashi’s lips - “is a common name, and you didn’t seem -  _You_  never said anything, so - ”

“How the hell was I supposed to know?!” Abe shouts, and fuck Izumi’s warnings, he knows he’s shouting now, he knows he’s boiling inside, he watches Mihashi cringe and he fucking  _hates_  it but  _fuck_  it’s been months, months of ache and loneliness, and he’s never felt so much - anger? Never just  _felt_  so much - “You should have fucking said something,  _anything_ , I was going fucking  _crazy_  and you could have - !”

“P-Plaque!” Mihashi stutters out, tears coming freely now, the heels of his hands pressing hard to his eyes as he uses his shirt to collect them. “M-My name is… on the p-plaque, and y-you n-never…! So I…! How was  _I_ supposed to know?!”

“ _What_ plaque?” Abe asks, and he doesn’t say it but he hears the accusation in his own voice. Mihashi’s hands come away from his face, his broken, beautiful, wrecked face, and in that second, Abe realizes what he’s doing.

“By the mail!” he wails, and Abe doesn’t remember Mihashi’s name, but he does remember the hag having a nameplate, before, so of course, it made sense that Mihashi would have one too. He feels deflated, suddenly, because honestly, he’d been so busy looking at  _Mihashi_  that he’d never looked at his desk, and maybe, even, a little bit, he’d been too scared to see if there had been a plaque, not enough to consciously avoid it, but maybe…

“Mihashi - ”

“Here, just - get out. Just get out, please,” Mihashi says, turning around and taking the salad, the beautiful, romaine and tomato and feta cheese salad he’d made, and pressing the bowl heavily into Abe’s hands before staring pointedly, balefully, red-eyed and stone-faced at the door. Abe’s fingers clench on the bowl, but he doesn’t know what to say, knows he is the  _worst_  with words and whatever he  _did_  say would make this - this  _thing_  worse, so he just turns and leaves, shutting the door behind him and standing in the hall. He hears a thump in Mihashi’s apartment, and he knows, somehow, that it was Mihashi crumpling to the ground, hands pressed to his eyes and sobs shaking his shoulder. Abe wonders if he’ll feel better if he throws up.

“Taka?” comes a sudden voice in the hall from the elevator, his mother, and wordlessly, he presses the salad into her hands and then turns to go inside Mihashi’s apartment. Mihashi looks up from where he was sitting on the floor of his kitchen, eyes wide and wet and Abe has never seen anything so beautiful nor ached so much in his life.

“Your dinner - ” Mihashi started, but Abe cut him off, fists tight at his thighs.

“I can’t - ” he clamps his jaw shut, eyes clenching shut before he forces himself to look down at where Mihashi was confused, angry, hurt, all of those negative things because of  _him_ , “I can’t leave you like this. I can’t… I can’t let you look like this.”

When Mihashi just stares up at him, Abe steps further, carefully, crouches down, then gets to his knees, and then, carefully, he sits next to Mihashi, not touching him but close enough to feel the warmth of his space. He knows his mother is probably still standing in the hall, confused because Abe had just gone into an apartment that wasn’t his own like it  _was_ , and he definitely owed her an apology and an explanation, but this -  _this_  was more important.

“I… never saw the plaque,” Abe says, carefully, after a silence so long he hurts from it, “because I couldn’t stop looking at you.”

He hears the soft intake of Mihashi’s breath, so soft he’s not even sure if he really heard it or if he just knew it would be there. And then, “When I saw your name on the mail, I couldn’t stop staring at it and I tripped over that box,” he says, and then his lips curl into a tiny smile, and he laughs just a little. But the smile and the laugh don’t make Abe feel better, because they’re so bitter, so absolutely humorless, he cringes. “I couldn’t look at you for a  _week_.”

Abe opens his mouth to stay something else, but Mihashi shakes his head, sighing out softly. “Go to your dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, and something in his voice is final, not in an angry way, but just. Final. Abe suddenly feels cold and terrified, because there’s nothing there in Mihashi’s voice, no heat, no longing, just nothing, and he’s never heard of someone fucking up meeting their soulmate, but -

“Yeah, okay.” He gets up, and he turns around to see Mihashi’s face buried in his knees, and it hurts hurts  _hurts_  but he leaves Mihashi’s apartment and goes into his own.

His mother and father are inside, already having set the table and just waiting for him. Abe slides into the chair across from his mother, and they start eating in silence, or at least until his father tries the chicken. “Pretty good, son,” he says, clasping a hand on Abe’s shoulder. “Not your mothers, but good.”

They finish eating with small talk the only conversation, at least until Abe’s father gets situated on the couch to watch the game and Abe goes with his mother out to the balcony. She looks to the right and gasps, a charmed smile on her face.

“An herb garden,” she identifies, looking at all of the non-flowering plants Abe now knew were Mihashi’s. “Your neighbor must be quite the cook! Did he do the chicken?”

“No,” Abe sullenly snaps, and his mother laughs, pinching his cheek. “…He did make the salad though.”

There were a few moments of silence stretched between them, and Abe wonders how to bring it up to his mother when she spares him the awkward pain. “So… Are you going to talk about it or do I need to get you another beer first?”

Abe huffs out a laugh, and his mother’s shoulder bumps into his own fondly. He looks down at the bottom, thumb peeling at the label. “It’s… I might have really messed something up,” he admits, ice in his gut at the finality in Mihashi’s voice when he’d left and trying to decide just how much to tell his mother, how much was private, how much he just really fucking needed someone to talk to. He thought about calling Izumi, knew Izumi could definitely get his shit straight, but he was off the grid on a shoot with Nishihiro until next Thursday, and Sakaeguchi was incapable of keeping his fucking mouth shut, and Hanai was just about as bad at this kind of thing as he was.

“Is it about that cute neighbor of yours?” she asks, and Abe looks up, perplexed. “I saw him when we were moving in, and he’s just the sweetest thing. Real shy, but sweet.”

“Yeah,” Abe agrees, flicking at the label a bit more before taking a long swig of his beer. He lets it hang in the back, bitter in his mouth, then swallows. His thumb traces the rim of his bottle, and then he sighs out, suddenly tired. “He’s my soulmate.”

Abe’s mother gasps, and in the blink of an eye, her arms are wrapped around his head and his face is buried sideways in her bosom. It’s warm, and she smells familiar, and Abe sinks into the embrace like he hasn’t done since elementary school. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy for you,” she says, pulling back and pressing a kiss to his forehead. She clutches his hand tightly, turning in her seat. “You sound… upset, though.”

Abe closes his eyes. “I made him think we weren’t soulmates because I was too busy looking at him to read his name plaque, and then I yelled at him for not telling me he had my name,” he says, opening his eyes to stare up into the night sky he could barely see for the light pollution. “He wouldn’t even look at me when I left. He practically kicked me out of his apartment. I…I really messed it up, Mom.”

Abe’s mother sighed, and she squeezed Abe’s hand where she was holding it. “It’s… it’s not always as easy as it sounds in the movies, you know,” she says. “Once you find them, and fall in love, that’s the easy part. You’ve got to work to stay in love, and sometimes it’s a real tough fight. But as long as it’s worth it, just keep trying. They’re your soulmate for a reason.”

It’s not too often that Abe wants to cry, and the word love feels a little heavy for the champagne butterflies in his stomach, but he finds himself swallowing thickly now, or at least until his mother pinches his side hard. “Ow - What the - ?!”

“No more yelling at my future son-in-law, Taka. With an herb garden like that, that boy knows how to cook, and I’m not going to let you mess this one up.”

\----------

Abe’s parents leave late, and Abe gets up early, determined to fix whatever nebulous Thing was between him and Mihashi. Or at least, he plans on it, but when he gets down into the lobby, the mail window is empty, and Abe doesn’t have enough time before work to go up and see if he just hasn’t come down yet.

The mail window is empty when Abe comes home after practice, and knocking on Mihashi’s door proves fruitless. He goes and sits out on his balcony, waiting for when Shuuto tells him that her owner is home, but his bedtime comes before Mihashi does, or at least, Shuuto doesn’t go inside when Mihashi comes.

The next day is equally Mihashi-less, and the next, and the next, until summer comes and Abe’s schedule becomes so completely swamped with baseball that he doesn’t have time to pine. He leaves at four thirty for the five a.m. practice, and doesn’t get back to his apartment until ten thirty, exhausted and collapsing into bed. Even his weekends disappear, eaten up by games and the desperation of Koshien.

Before Abe knows it, it’s been a month since their fight, a month since Abe found his soulmate, a month of a constant pain on his hip that he hadn’t really noticed until just now for how unceasing it had been, a pain shaped like  _Ren_  and like cinnamon beneath his skin.

“Ren?” Hanai asks, and Abe suddenly realizes that he’s rubbing the place on his hip unconsciously. He hasn’t told Hanai yet, just nods.

“It’s… complicated,” Abe answers, and Hanai nods. With Tajima Yuuichirou as a soulmate, Abe didn’t doubt things could get complicated.

“Don’t let it get into your head,” Hanai says, using his old captain’s voice. After four years of university under a truly iron-fisted captain, it doesn’t work on Abe anymore. But he takes it and lets it burrow deep inside, remembers that, well, Mihashi really  _hadn’t_  said anything, and ‘Takaya is a common name’ was a pretty shitty excuse when Abe was pretty sure he’d been kinda obvious about his infatuation.

But, he still can’t help it, not quite, not when he realizes that his hip flares any time he thinks about Mihashi, and he finds himself sitting out on his balcony even after being dead from practice, computer in his lap and skype pulled up with Izumi Kousuke’s bored face on the screen.

“So you’re calling me because you found your soulmate, bitched at him, and now you’re sulky because he’s avoiding you,” Izumi recaps blandly, sipping on a juice box and dicking around with his Canon in his hands.

“He knew first,” Abe says, and Izumi rolls his eyes.

“Abe, ‘Takaya’ really  _is_  a common fucking name. If he  _did_  get excited every time he met someone named Takaya, the guy’s probably jaded as fuck by now. It’s a wonder there’s any magic in it left for him.” Abe feels stung by that comment, and, well. Maybe that’s what Mihashi  _really_  meant. “Besides, I  _know_  you. You probably sounded like you were going to kill his mom when you yelled at him.”

“…I was pretty angry,” Abe acknowledges, and Izumi moans.

“The poor boy never stood a chance,” he drawls, and Abe feels the scowl snap into place. “Look, you have a pretty simple line of questioning here, but I’ll walk you through it since you’re my best bro and all that. Question one: do you even want the guy?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A fair one,” Izumi responds, putting his camera down in his lap and looking at the screen. “A soulmate doesn’t have to be a romantic thing if you don’t want it to be. A lot of people just, y’know. Don’t do anything with their soulmate. It doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to.”

Abe remembers the blossom of warmth the one time they’d touched, like a brand in his memory. Mihashi’s hand settled over his own, showing him exactly how to catch his mailbox. His stomach shimmers at the memory and his eyes fall shut in a want so tender and affectionate, it causes his throat to ache. “Yeah, I want it,” he admits, softly.

“Okay, cool,” Izumi says nonchalantly, as if Abe hadn’t just bared his fucking soul for him, and it feels good. “Question two: are you willing to do whatever it takes to get him?”

“Yes,” Abe answers, and he watches Izumi shrug.

“Then, there you go. It doesn’t matter if it takes the rest of your life, right? You want him. He has your name. Make him see why.”

\----------

(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘how do i impress my soulmate’, ‘easy chocolate recipes’, ‘how to get chocolate out of a white shirt’, ‘how to write poetry’, ‘what rhymes with pitcher’, ‘how to make the best paper airplane’.)

\----------

The first time Abe writes a poem, it’s shit. Like, it’s really shit. It goes right into the trashcan. In fact, the first twenty or so poems go straight into the trashcan. By the time the night is over, he has filled his trashcan, wasted about half a ream of paper, and is more sure than ever that he made the right choice by staying a jock his entire life and leaving the humanities to his clearly more-capable brother.

It occurs to him that it’s probably really stupid for him to write a poem, because, well, he’s not a fucking poet for one and literally everything he’s writing is either derivative of some cheesy pop song, really fucking stupid, and just overall Not Abe Takaya; but also, it feels like he’s going about this the wrong way. He’s not trying to woo Mihashi, not really. What he really needs is to apologize, and explain that no seriously he really  _had_  been too busy staring at his (pitcher, of fucking course) arms in his shirts and really  _didn’t_  look at his name, and, yeah, he was super super sorry he yelled at him but he was stressed about his parents coming over for dinner and lonely and his hip was hurting without him knowing it and -

And then, he had an entire page of what felt like half excuse and half blithering, but it was a start, he supposed. Whatever. It would work, he decides, so he folds it up, walks onto his balcony, tosses it, and watches as it droops and sails right down to the street below.

“For fuck’s sake,” Abe groans, clutching his head in his hands, only to watch in complete horror as some random person picked up his paper airplane love note and starts opening it. His whole body catches on fire in sheer embarrassment, and he quickly ducks away from the balcony, shutting the sliding door and flopping down on his ass as he simmers. Okay, so maybe it was kind of stupid to try and put all of his emotions on a piece of paper and hope they sailed over onto Mihashi’s balcony, but it had sounded kind of romantic in his head, and, yeah. Okay. The universe was clearly against him being romantic. He gets it. Loud and clear.

(Some other ideas for soulmate-impressing techniques were cooking them a meal, which, no, Abe would kind of like Mihashi to stay  _alive_  long enough for them to make out, thanks; making a slideshow of pictures, which would be kind of cool except for the fact that, well, y’know, he  _had_  no fucking pictures of them together; and spending time with them, which, yes,  _please_ , except Mihashi was still on Avoid Abe Takaya mode and Abe was still in Koshien Is A Month Away mode, so, no.)

He ends up deciding that this is something that just really needs to be done in person, and his eyes fall down once again to the ream of paper he’d smuggled home from Nishiura, and his original idea. It was still pretty fucking romantic, and maybe he just needed to, well, be himself. Except not  _too_  much himself, because he really did want to talk to Mihashi, and being himself meant that was an absolutely  _awful_  idea.

So, Abe grabs a piece of paper and his pen, and scribbles  _‘I want to talk to you - Abe’_ on it. He hesitates at the last second, and in a brief moment of - something, he puts  _Takaya_  on it too. Then, he folds the airplane again, being super precise, and he goes outside. He waits until the breeze stops, and with a heavy weight in his chest, he tosses it, then watches as Mihashi steps onto his balcony with a pitcher of water in his hands and gets a paper airplane to the face.

“Oh my God,” Abe groans in despair as Mihashi jerks and drops the pitcher of water all over his balcony. Shuuto snaps awake, and for a horrifying moment, Abe thinks  _oh my God if Shuuto falls over the balcony I’ll have killed Mihashi’s cat and he’ll never speak to me again_.

Shuuto does not, however, come anywhere near close to falling, and in fact just shoots a  _majorly_  unimpressed look at Mihashi before scrambling inside. Mihashi who, Abe notices, is completely soaked, and looking over at him with wide eyes and a shocked expression. He stares back for a second, because, well, this was definitely  _not_  part of the plan at all, but then he pulls himself together. “You should, uh, read the note,” he says, and Mihashi blinks at him once, then twice, then looks down.

“Note…?” he repeats, and then he disappears behind the wall of herbs and straightens with the paper airplane in his hands. He unfolds it, and Abe feels his heart pound in his chest with the kind of anticipation he hadn’t felt outside a baseball game. He watches Mihashi read it, then sees Mihashi take in a breath, exhale, then look up. “Um, okay, what - ”

“Not now, you should… You should get changed,” Abe interrupts quickly, then lets his voice soften as much as it can. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

“Oh, right,” Mihashi says, sounding kind of shocked, still. “Tomorrow?”

Abe opens his mouth to say yes, but then he remembers the last time Mihashi had said ‘see you tomorrow’, and, “No. I’ll… ten minutes? My place?”

Mihashi nods, and turns to go inside, pitcher still on his balcony, and the door shutting behind him. Abe exhales carefully, then closes his eyes and tries not to panic, because he thinks, suddenly, about the face Mihashi had made when he’d gotten hit with a paper airplane to the head, and he starts laughing, partially because it had been funny, and partially because he is so, so in love with Mihashi Ren,  _Ren_ , the cook and the mail boy and the person next door with the cat named after a pitch and the one who should have been the other half of his battery all this time, the piece of the game that had been missing his whole life. He is in  _love_  with Mihashi Ren.

He breezes into his apartment and tidies up a bit, mostly to keep his hands busy. (His thoughts are a lost cause, because it just keeps looping Mihashi’s chirpy laugh and half-smiles and the warmth of his hand over Abe’s on repeat until he’s dizzy with the knowledge that Mihashi is coming into his space and it felt  _good_.) Ten minutes pass, then fifteen, and right when Abe is sure that he’s about to take a sledgehammer to the wall between them (he’s lost his deposit off the charred kitchen wall anyway), there’s a timid knock on his door.

Abe opens it, and Mihashi is  _there_ , shifting nervously and eyes everywhere except Abe’s face, fingers worrying the hem of his shirt. “Hi,” he says, a tiny peep of a sound, and Abe moves to the side so he can step into Abe’s apartment and fuck but he looks good there, khaki capris and some neon-shirt under this little half-hoodie and the outfit’s a mess but it’s Mihashi so it’s  _perfect_.

“Beer?” Abe offers, and Mihashi nods, probably thankful to have something to do with his hands. Abe walks into the kitchen and grabs two, popping the caps off and tossing the tops into the trashcan before he gave himself a pep breath and turned to go back out into the great room. He’s going to have to go in there, and tell Mihashi he was sorry but he was so stupidly in love with him he couldn’t think straight, and he was an asshole to his friends too here let me call Izumi to prove it. He feels ready for the speech, but he freezes in the doorway when he sees Mihashi staring at the trashcan where it was overflowing with poem discards, feeling his whole face heat up.

“Are you, um,” Mihashi licks his lips nervously, and Abe, suddenly finding it hard to breathe, wants to beg him not to do that. “Writing? Something?”

Abe presses the beer into Mihashi’s hand, then sits next to him on the couch. “I was, uh. I was gonna write you a poem,” he admits, taking a swig of beer and absolutely  _not_  looking at Mihashi. “They were all really stupid, though, so then I tried to just. Tell you I was sorry for shouting, and stuff, except, uh. That airplane kind of. Landed on the street and someone else picked it up. So then. Well. You saw the third choice.” Abe doesn’t expect the snort of laughter, but he loves the way it makes him feel warm inside. Equally shocking is the way Mihashi puts his beer down and walks over to the trashcan, picking up one of the balled up poem rejects. “Mihashi - ”

“They’re for me, right?” Mihashi says, mouth twisted into a smile, and Abe watches with horror as Mihashi reads the first one and has to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing at it. He reaches for a second, and that’s the limit. Mihashi snags one anyway and darts around the couch, trying to unfurl it and read it aloud, voice filled with delight even as Abe was sure he was going to burst into flames if he didn’t catch Mihashi and stop him. “Your pretty eyes are so hazel, you meet my appraisal, you’d make my life richer if you’d just be my p - !”

Abe finally snags Mihashi’s wrist and tugs, only for his foot to catch on his rug as he twisted. There was a split second, and  _don’t let Mihashi get hurt_ , and then he was on the ground, breath knocked out of him from the floor beneath him and Mihashi on top of him. Mihashi was shaking, and a flash of terror goes through him at the thought that he’d hurt Mihashi. “Shit, Mihashi, are you - ”

Mihashi’s face comes up and Abe sees him, and he’s  _laughing_ , golden and bright and full and oh, if Abe hadn’t loved him before he certainly did now.

“That was… the worst poem I’ve ever read,” Mihashi says through desperate breaths, but when he finally manages to calm down enough to look down at Abe, it was an expression so soft and warm, Abe thinks for a second he’s swallowed his heart. And then, in a brief second, he realizes he’s seen it before, once, Mihashi looking down at a cup of coffee he’d known Abe had gotten him. “Are you okay? Um, from the fall, I mean.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Abe says, watching with confusion as Mihashi rolls his eyes and smiles.

“Abe-kun, you’re supposed to say no, and then I offer to kiss it better.”

“Oh,” Abe says, more than a little breathless, eyes dropping to Mihashi’s lips. He’s not really sure what he would have said next, probably something about them needing to talk, and him needing to apologize, or maybe something  _really_  stupid like how good it felt for Mihashi to be sitting on him like this and maybe he should try pinning Abe’s hands above his head, but all of that is wiped away as Mihashi lowers his body until they’re pressed together, collarbone to their feet, and then even closer as Mihashi brushes his lips in a breath against Abe’s. It’s not even a kiss, hardly, but Abe’s mouth parts on a whimper as his fingers curl helplessly in the fabric of Mihashi’s shirt, and he knows he’s wrecked. His eyes fall shut because he can’t look at Mihashi like this, it’s too much and he’s worried for a second, even then, that he’s going to black out. Instead, he just shivers and kisses Mihashi back, a little firmer, a real kiss, and he thinks then that he’s never going to be the same.

Mihashi pulls back, gets on his elbows and hovers above Abe, who blinks his eyes open to just look at Mihashi, mouth parted and face pink. He’s fucking beautiful, and Abe’s in  _love_ , in love enough to write shitty poetry and even try to make him chocolate. He’s so in love with Mihashi Ren, and his heart is thundering out of his chest with the force of everything inside, his hipbone feeling like starlight where Mihashi’s name is emblazoned on it. He suddenly just  _gets_  why people look for their soulmate, why all of the books and all of the movies talk about it, if it feels anything like this. He wants to say everything inside, but all he can manage is an agonized, “You were supposed to be my pitcher.”

Mihashi’s face gets a little sad beneath all of the warm tenderness, and he drops down to place a soft kiss on Abe’s chin. “I’m sorry,” he says, but Abe shakes his head, reaches up and threads a hand through Mihashi’s hair and just delights in the way that yes, it was exactly as soft as he’d thought it would be. He runs his hand through the strands, pulls just hard enough for Mihashi’s eyes to flutter shut and a soft sound to come out, his hips rubbing just enough against Abe’s to remind him where they are. He lets his hand come to Mihashi’s nape and caresses the side of his neck with his thumb, skin-hungry and wanting to touch every piece of his soulmate.

He wants to talk to Mihashi,  _needs_  to, needs to say everything that had been on that one shitty piece of paper, and he will, because he’s going to do this right, they’re gonna be good - no, the  _Best_ , but he doesn’t -  _can’t_  - take away that melting look on his face, not now. This is their moment to slot together like they were meant to be, to touch, explore, begin to learn each other as well as they knew themselves. “Where is it?” he asks, meaning his name, and Mihashi’s eyes darken, teeth sinking into his lower lip as a positively wicked expression blooms on his face that is as uncharacteristic as it is fucking  _delicious_.

“Why don’t you look for it?”

\----------

(Abe’s recent google search history: ‘how to get semen out of carpet’, ‘how to get semen out of throw pillow’, ‘how wide is a king sized bed’, ‘two-bedroom apartments saitama’, ‘time right now in new york’.)

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(Mihashi’s recent google search history: ‘small dog breeds that are good with cats’, ‘how do i impress my boyfriend’s parents’, ‘commercial restaurant for sale saitama’, ‘three-tier wedding cake recipes’, ‘best places to hide an engagement ring’.)

 


End file.
